Plant-based Homesteading and Sustainable Living

Musings

First off, if you’re coming here from the “Things We Love” section of Harrowsmith’s spring issue, thank you so much for taking the time to stop by! I have been a huge fan of their magazine, books, and TV show since I was a teen, so it was an unbelievable honour to be featured; I’mRead more

So much for the one month hiatus that I talked about way back in September (which I only got around to mentioning to my Facebook friends, now that I think about it). I hope you had a great fall and are enjoying 2011 so far! The break came about when I stepped in as temporaryRead more

I noticed while going through my list of posts the other day that it was coming up to three years since I started writing this blog. I was also getting close to having written 300 posts. Without too much effort on my part (unless you count my squeezing out yesterday’s brief comment on the stateRead more

I’ve been feeling like I should clarify what I was trying to say in my previous post, which actually started out as a much longer, more involved post that I never seemed able to finish because it had become too large and unwieldy. Since I tend to suffer from mental paralysis whenever I feel overwhelmedRead more

Hello out there! Obviously I haven’t quite gotten a handle on my recent bout of blogging laziness, but I’ve been feeling a little more inspired lately and am hoping to stage a comeback. I may do occasional updates on the house, but for now, I would like to turn my focus back toward my twoRead more

I just realized this evening that I’ve been blogging for a year and three days now! I’d been thinking about doing an anniversary post on the actual day, but with all that’s been going on I forgot all about it, and the day came and went without any fanfare. If someone had told me 13Read more

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I watched An Inconvenient Truth over the holidays. Having read a fair amount on climate change already, most of the information didn’t come as a real surprise to me, but it did discuss a couple of things that really shocked me. One of the most alarming thingsRead more

I’m feeling rather sorry for myself tonight, and for a pretty pathetic reason, unfortunately.We found ourselves a gorgeous set of used kitchen cabinets on Craigslist last weekend, just the colour and style we were looking for, and for only $500. We drove out to take a look at them on Monday night, made plans forRead more

Have I mentioned lately how much I’d like to get out of the city? Vancouver is extremely safe as cities go, but as I sit here typing, there is a plain clothes police officer sitting in my tomato patch doing surveillance on (I’m assuming) one of our neighbors. At least they had the decency toRead more

Getting out of town on our holidays has (as it usually does) reignited our desire to move out of the city. We had only ever planned on staying for 2 years when we came here just before our daughter was born. We’d just finished university, backpacked around Europe for a few months, and decided thatRead more